Handbook of Tyranny

Handbook of Tyranny
Theo Deutinger
Lars Müller Publishers, February 2018



Flexicover | 8-1/4 x 11-3/4 inches | 164 pages | 987 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-3037785348 | $30.00

Publisher Description:

Handbook of Tyranny portrays the routine cruelties of the twenty-first century through a series of detailed non-fictional graphic illustrations. None of these cruelties represent extraordinary violence—they reflect day-to-day implementation of laws and regulations around the globe.

Every page of the book questions our current world of walls and fences, police tactics and prison cells, crowd control and refugee camps. The dry and factual style of storytelling through technical drawings is the graphic equivalent to bureaucratic rigidity born of laws and regulations. The level of detail depicted in the illustrations of the book mirror the repressive efforts taken by authorities around the globe.

The twenty-first century shows a general striving for an ever more regulated and protective society. Yet the scale of authoritarian intervention and their stealth design adds to the growing difficulty of linking cause and effect. Handbook of Tyranny gives a profound insight into the relationship between political power, territoriality and systematic cruelties.

dDAB Commentary:

Earlier this year, the Storefront for Art and Architecture exhibited State of Tyranny, which displayed "methods and tools of urban design that seek to disable public agency in the name of public safety." It was based on Theo Deutinger's Handbook of Tyranny, published one year beforehand. Although I attended the opening and wrote about the exhibition, I was unable to go on one of the walking tours of "Tyranny Trail," which started at the Storefront and snaked through the "high security zones of Lower Manhattan" to culminate, appropriately enough, at the highly fortified World Trade Center site. The three pieces — the book, the exhibition, and the walking tour (kept alive by a foldout map available at the exhibition and online as a PDF) — are gradients of the same theme, moving from drawings to samples on display to in situ interactions: Our actions in public spaces are determined in large part through design. The design of benches in Lower Manhattan, for instance, maintain our personal space from others though armrests, yet those features also make it impossible for people to sleep on them. (That said, the omission of benches, and in turn other non-designs, are another means of control — and a cheap one at that.)

There are plenty of elements, like the city benches, that we confront on a daily basis but don't pay attention to. By illustrating them through drawings and clear text, Deutinger's "handbook" opens our eyes to the many layers of design carried out by governments (primarily, but also corporations) to control citizens. He starts from the least physical but most global aspect of control — free movement from one country to another — and ends with the softest and most unexpected area of design control: landscape features. These range from prickly vines and shrubs at perimeters to decoy owls that deter pigeons and gravel walkways that alert residents of intruders. In between these chapters are just about everything used to demarcate territories and keep the people within them under some form of control: border fences and walls, refugee camps, crowd control, prison cells, even slaughterhouses. The straightforward illustrations look like they could have been pulled from Architectural Graphic Standards, making the book read at times like an actual handbook for tyrannical dictators. Yet its raison d'être is the opposite: "A confrontation with cruelty is necessary first to understand it, and second to react to it," as Deutinger writes in the Introduction. He's not done. Next month sees the publication of his Ultimate Atlas, in which he "illustrates the basic data of Earth and its inhabitants to create a total portrait of the planet."

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Author Bio:

Theo Deutinger is an architect, writer, and designer of socio-cultural studies. He is founder and head of TD, an office that combines architecture with research, visualization, and conceptual thinking in all scale levels from global planning, urban master plans, architecture to graphical and journalistic work.

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